Quite a lot of nothing going on right now, as I wait for the market to sell off so that it can turn around and crush the shorts more.

My feelings of a market correction this year were predicated on bad data breaking into the faces of rosy optimism. But, instead we got nonchalant data; and while not rosy, that’s not necessarily the same as a disappointment.

Look, recessions can’t last forever. We’re already five years out from the 2009 lows. At some point, we will grow again. Maybe that time is now. Or maybe, we’re just far enough out and everyone has enough unrealized gains baked into the pie not to care.

Either way, I have a nice fat little cash position, but my terror level and need to keep 50% long exposure controlled in case of another 10% wash out is ebbing. The summer has past and now the fall is here.

Obamacare is coming into effect, and that will be a little shock, but it’s a shock people are increasingly aware of. And the good men and women of American industry are doing their best to ensure the fallout of this lands squarely onto the shoulders of the American jackass.

My guess is that through October, the market will get a little messy as healthcare premiums get released and sticker shock frightens the market. Then, we rally into Christmas, because any company with assets over $ fifty million self-funds anyway.

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The veranda I’m resting on is a medley of sounds, smells and sights each so subtly spectacular that any words I craft for them falls pitifully short. Each breeze or noise carries this awesome unpredictability that just strips you of any and all illusion of knowledge.

So much chaos and yet, from it, springs this well of near order and harmony that defies explanation. It’s very presence mocks us. The most fundamental of laws, so absolute on the smallest of scales, suddenly broken with impunity by Maxwell’s demon.

Take the 21 year Glenlivet Scotch in the bottom of my rocks glass. It’s such a simple straightforward liquid. The tastes and aroma themselves a pleasantness that we’ve become so accustomed to it hardly seems worth talking about at all.

But the journey that this bottle took to get into my liquor cabinet is itself an epic so fraught with beautiful chaos that the mere existence of it is almost a miracle.

This was the handcrafted product of a master artisan; quite possibly the greatest work of this man or woman’s life. Decades of careful study, impinged with failures, setbacks, and hardship, somehow gives way to this – the culmination of their lives. Twenty one years the liquid spent in a casket, with no way for the humble worker to possibly know whether it would be an accomplishment worthy of the admiration and appreciation of anyone, on a warm August night. Or a spoiled waste.

When this drink was being fashioned by the thoughtful work of some person, who may be dead now for all I know, the modern internet of the World Wide Web probably did not exist. Neither did cell phones. If we humbly admit that the real time to create this masterpiece extended well longer than 21 years, then it is equally plausible that neither did personal computers, CD’s, or DNA fingerprinting.

And what of the life of this obscure person, who worked so hard so that we can have this experience, decades later? This person was probably born before the cure for Polio, before MRI, and before Tylenol.

Or take the cigar, burning faintly in my left hand. The worker who rolled this cigar is no less mysterious, if not quite so distant in time. While this person may be closer to I am today, the cigar itself is a good symbol of the immense energies so inconspicuously present in our day to day lives.

What would happen if these people failed to find good students to pass their crafts on to? A dereliction of this sacred duty could deprive us of these small comforts in ways so terribly beyond our control… and yet we indulge in so many of these wonders without ever stopping to appreciate what splendor it is.

The smoke curling up the length of my finger, wrapping on an angle with my knuckles, and fraying into the space before my eyes, contains no less mysteries as the men and women who touch us every day.

If I froze the space in time, I could construct a field model that near perfectly describe the smokes wispy pathways. I could do this for any instant you might desire. I could do this for approximately every instant between two arbitrary points in our view.

But it would be such a wasted effort, for it would tell me nothing. The next light breeze to come along would swipe away my hubris and any pretense of understanding as definitively as mortality will surely swipe away Cain Hammond Thaler.

If I attempted to control fate, and protect my model, I could spend my life networking across the space around my small field. I could create thousands of adaptations based on information of change pushing into my little balcony. And if I wasted all the energy which my life has to offer, this effort could give me a tiny window into the future. But this window would expire so quickly, all of that time would be wasted. If I could have firm control over every particle in this county, the pressure from the rest of the planet would quickly exert itself.

If I could control the planet, the heavens would move against me in a matter of minutes.

The greatest minds of our species have understood this. As example, Poincare showed it over one hundred and fifty years ago. Lorenz’ life was dedicated to this pursuit. Feigenbaum persists in this study to this day. Yet, here we are, listening seriously to voices telling us that our understanding of the unpredictable, the unknown, the unfathomable, is somehow better because now we know that our understanding of these things can never truly be better. And always, the simple terrifying truth of it all is never uttered.

Folly and arrogance of the highest order are found in all of these things.

Sit with me on this pleasant night. Take slow breaths after the inhale of the cigar smoke. Feel the cool air take life into your lungs.

The dynamic between our taking breath and the trees around us are chaotic. The minute functions of our respective bodies is chaotic. The impact of infinite iterations of the universe are chaotic. Yet, time and again, we begin our sentences with the dreadful words, “we know”.

The work of these people is being tainted by the second hand malpractice of their misguided pupils, striving to apply false or trivial knowledge.

The sun is setting on the horizon, the trees hiding in the shadows. And they are as invisible to me as their secret inner workings.

Prepare for bed and rest. And do so in the beautiful comfort of our complete ignorance. Tomorrow is as unfathomable as yesterday, and yesterday will soon be as hazy to your mind as tomorrow. But the moment…the moment is wonderfully clear.

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I will make this brief. I have now finished both AEC’s and CLP’s earnings transcripts, and have found a causal link between the two REITs and outrageous comments taunting company management, making my blood boil.

Effective immediately, one Michael Bilerman is on the radar as a possible enemy of the state of the 9th floor.

Keep an eye out for this man, as his input into both conference calls was – shall we say – reprehensible.

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Excuse me, but I will be gone all day, perhaps returning briefly in the afternoon.

Enjoy yourself in my absense. I’ve locked the liquor cabinet, the cigars are hidden, and there’s water in the tap.

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I will hand you this; there seem to be legitimate rules for hyping Musk. So far I haven’t managed to nail down what those are exactly, but they’re there, and at least consistent.

Point out that TSLA is probably insanely overvalued at a decade of 40% growth rates, and you get rotten tomatoes flung at you.

However, if you then turn around and suggest that Musk is going to propose creating a subterranean cavern system that straight bores to major US cities, you have also crossed a line and are called a psychopath (perhaps rightly).

Obviously, suggesting that the billionaire spaceship maker would ever propose burying his human fed rail gun, air hockey tubing several thousand feet to a few miles beneath the surface was just silly…

As it is, I am just fairly impressed as to how far one Mr. or Mrs. Ottnott went to actually demonstrate that the math behind my last post (creative though it was) was inconsistent with anything that could be actually constructed. It takes a certain patience to sit down and calculate distances using radian methods.

Tunneling across California would cost upwards of $150-200 Billion.

I did catch one problem with the numbers, but this was really not part of my argument to begin with. The distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles is really just under 400 miles on a map.

The radial distance between the two, using a Great Circle and the longitudes and latitudes of the respective cities and a circumference of 24,900 miles (not wholly accurate since the Earth is lumpy and not a perfect sphere), is about 350 miles. Whereas the rough surface distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco according to map quest can be found at about 380 to 390 miles due to topography.

A tunnel (any tunnel) would shave about 8-10% off the distance of the trip, or theoretical increase the “speed” of a like moving object inside the tunnel by about that much. So a 600 mph object would seem to do 645-650 mph inside of the tunnel.

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It’s the weekend, and before I take off, I decided to spend an hour taking a stab at Elon’s immortality amongst the faithful.

He’s set to announce his superbly hyped, probably unrealistic hyperloop design next month. I intend to release his idea first, for the purpose of killing a god.

My suspicion is that people chiming in so far aren’t even on in the right parking lot. Musk is the guy who built a spaceship company and is currently trying to blanket the US in state of the art charging stations in under two years.

Reality isn’t exactly a factor here.

My guess is that he’s going to propose taking advantage of inefficiencies in geodesics to construct a path that’s shorter than the “shortest” Great Circle path over the Earth’s surface, while setting it up in a way that reduces energy consumption along the way.

A.k.a. bury a big damn tunnel that loops radially towards the Earth’s core.

Something like this:

The shortest integral path along a geodesic surface is along the path of a Great Circle – that’s one of the key findings of Riemann. However, the shortest path between two points, at least in Euclidean space (of which the Earth’s relative size is still small enough to talk about multivariate calculus) remains a “straight line” in the Euclidean sense.

Since the Earth’s a sphere, there exist lots of paths through the surface which are shorter than simply walking along the circle perimeter. This is sort of complimentary thinking of how airplane flight paths are calculated.

If you choose a path that offsets with its lowest point not in the middle of the distribution, then you could potentially construct a tunnel that rolls “downhill” most of the way and takes less distance to travel than any possible path over the surface by a bus or a plane. You don’t need to travel 800 miles per hour, or whatever the estimates are, because you’re utilizing geometry to shorten the distance – basically you’re just moving smart, rather than fast.

If you construct two similar paths mirroring each other, then you have one directional and one return path, both of which roll downhill most of the way, and only require minimal energy to lift you back to the surface.

Interestingly, this approach only works over very large surface areas, because small regions on a globe approximate flat space. Of course, finding some paths that will actually work will be calculation intensive, because at some point the roll straightens out relative to the core and you stop rolling “downhill”. I’m guessing if this is sort of his idea, then his calculations have found a family of paths that will pull it off.

Since any curved path with one leg shorter than another resembles a saddle point, it evokes imagery of hyperbolic geometry…hence, Hyperloop.

Just a guess here. Naturally if I’m right, I demand full credit for early publication (no I’m not that stupid it will never happen).

I like my odds though, because this approach is:

1) Imaginative
2) Physics intensive/clever
3) Totally unrealistic

Hence, it just sort of screams “Classic Musk”.

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